City, Climate, and Architecture

The publication rethinks climate control – a key concern of the discipline of architecture – through the lens of city climate phenomena over the course of the 20th century. Based on a history of climate control on urban scales, it promotes the integration of indoors and outdoors in order to reduce environmental and thermal loads in cities. Just as heating and cooling practices inside the buildings are affecting the (urban) climate outdoors, urban heat islands are influencing the energy requirements and thermal conditions inside the buildings.
While the first part of the book focuses on the interwar period in Europe, the publication’s second part considers examples from all over the globe, tracing the growing significance of ecological thinking for the design of urban environments.

Prof. Dr. Sascha Roesler is an architect and architectural theorist, working at the intersection of architecture, ethnography, and science and technology studies. He is the Associate Professor for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland (Università della Svizzera Italiana) and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich. Between 2013 and 2015, Roesler was a senior researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory (Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability), and between 2015 and 2021, had the position of Swiss National Science Foundation Professor for Architecture and Theory at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, leading a research project on "Architecture and Urban Climates." Roesler has published widely on issues of global architecture, sustainability, and environmental technologies. His books include Weltkonstruktion (Gebr. Mann, 2013), a global history of architectural ethnography, and Habitat Marocain Documents (Park Books, 2015), a volume on the transformation of a colonial settlement in Casablanca.